Communications infrastructure in today's society consists of a wide variety of media, both wired and wireless, to transport information among many spatially distributed users to deliver a variety of services. Each form of communication service may have different service demands in terms of availability, throughput, error quality, timeliness, etc. In some situations wired media are preferred for transport, particularly for bulk data transfer between fixed points. In other scenarios, the desire for mobility and rapid deployment leads to data transport via wireless media. In general, communication among users for voice, video, messaging, etc. may employ both wired and wireless media for data transport.
At the same time, information sharing via packet-switched Internet technology has had unprecedented growth over the past two decades. Internet applications, such as Web browsing, emails, instant messaging, file transfers, etc. have become essential utilities for business, government, and personal transactions. User access to the Internet began primarily using local connections to wired modems or local area networks (LANs) using, for example, Ethernet-based wired networks, but current usage has migrated more and more towards wireless user access using such wireless standards such as the various 802.11 standards (WiFi).
Recently, convergence of traditional wireless and wired communication technologies and the Internet has increased considerably. This convergence has benefitted the user community in several ways. For example, Internet Web browsers are now implemented on mobile devices, information searches may be performed anywhere using wireless access, entertainment content may be easily downloadable onto portable devices, digital voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephony may be implemented on personal devices, personal navigation devices (PNDs) may be used while in motion, etc.
However, the downside of this increased diversity of mobile applications has resulted in a multiplicity of dedicated user devices with increased burden of costs, device types, and content management. Today's business challenge is to provide a focused convergence of all of these applications and services into a single platform which provides the access point to the global Internet.